Songs of Defiance
Field Note: Why We Sing Carols When the World Feels Broken
In times of despair, the words that resonate most deeply are often the oldest and most honest:
And in despair, I bowed my head;
“There is no peace on earth,” I said;
“For hate is strong,
And mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!”
This has been a heavy week. The kind of week where headlines make it hard to sing about peace without feeling the weight in our chests. Violence close to home and far away. Loss that feels senseless. Grief arrives without warning. Perhaps that is why these lines feel less like poetry and more like a simple truth we all recognise.
The Honesty of the Bells
It is sobering how often we do not know what we do not know. We play and sing these songs year after year, as children, in shopping centres, in churches, around tables. Only later do we learn the landscape they were written against.
“I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day” was written by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow during the American Civil War. Cannon fire drowned out church bells. The country was tearing itself apart. Longfellow himself carried a deep, personal loss. He did not write from a place of safety or resolution. He wrote Christmas while the world felt broken.
What strikes us is that he lets despair speak first. He bows his head. He says out loud what many of us think but feel uneasy admitting: There is no peace. Hate feels louder than the song.
Only then do the bells answer back. Not softly. Not politely.
Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”
What an answer. Not sentiment. Defiance.
The Unreceived Song
Another carol echoes this resistance, though more quietly. “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” emerged in the middle of social unrest and war. It barely mentions the manger. Instead, it listens for angels singing peace while the world rushes past, too busy, too loud, too divided to hear.
One verse often omitted names this plainly: the noise of people at war with one another drowns out the song. Peace is announced, but not received.
That feeling is acutely familiar to us. These songs do not deny the darkness; they sing directly into it.
Even “White Christmas”, which we typically treat as nostalgic and cheerful, carries a quiet ache. It is a song about memory. About places and people that exist somewhere behind us. Irving Berlin wrote it while mourning the death of his son, who passed on Christmas Day, 1928.
In that grief, snow becomes a way of naming longing. Home becomes an idea more than a location. The song is gentle. Restrained. Melancholy.
The Hope That Has Not Yet Resolved
Once we begin to notice this pattern, it stays with us. Some of the songs we return to each year are not songs of arrival. They are songs of waiting. Of hope that has not yet resolved. Of peace that is promised, but not yet obvious. “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel” is an ancient carol, a song for the in-between.
Faith has always made room for this tension. The Christmas story itself begins in darkness. A world under occupation. A long season of waiting. A small Light that does not overwhelm the night, but appears within it.
A star does not erase the darkness. It tells us where to look.
So when a week like this one arrives, when the news feels relentless, and grief feels close, it makes sense that these are the songs that endure. They were written by people who knew what it meant to hope without pretending.
Maybe that is why we keep singing them.
Not because they fix anything.
But because they tell the Truth, and still refuse to let despair have the last word.